Island Jumper 3

by M H Ryan

  “Sorry,” I said. “I know we’ve brought you and your family a lot of trouble, and if I could change anything to keep them alive, I would.”

  “Thank you. While my father had noble intentions, my brother did not.” She glanced back at the ocean and then to me. “My brother died in battle, but he won’t go to the Nyamyra, but to a less honorable place. I hope he can find peace there.” She touched her head as she closed her eyes tight.

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I wasn’t going to ask for details right then. Plus, I had more urgent matters to discuss with her.

  “Shaya, one of the Crultar showed us where the king is and where they are holding another of our kind. Can you look at the map we’ve made and tell us if you know this island?” I asked.

  This revelation shocked Shaya. She gestured to Emma who came to her and held her hand. After a few seconds, she spoke.

  “The Crultar would never speak of their king,” Shaya said.

  “I can be compelling when I want to,” I said. “They shared a few things with us and one is this map.”

  I walked to the area that I had smoothed out and placed the various stones representing known islands. I showed her the different rocks and what they represented. She nodded, looking at the map with interest. Words were pain, and the look on Emma’s face let Shaya know that she wasn’t going to put up with any extra ones.

  “This is the king’s island. Do you know it?”

  She shook her head. “My father did. Full of wonders and horrors is the king.”

  Emma took a deep breath and looked uncomfortable.

  “Do you know this island?” I used a stick and pointed at the island that held a woman I suspected was from our ship.

  Shaya studied it and pointed at each rock in turn, as if calculating the distances.

  “I think so,” she said, holding Emma’s hand.

  “This sucks, guys,” Emma said, putting her free hand on the side of her head.

  “So you can guide us there?” I asked.

  “Yes, but let me scout it first. Two or three days,” Shaya said.

  Not wanting to put Emma through any more pain, I nodded and said, “Okay, that’s enough.”

  Emma let go of her hand and exhaled, as if she’d been holding her breath.

  Shaya rubbed Emma’s shoulder and mouthed an apology. The conversation would have crippled Shaya, but with Emma as a medium, the trauma seemed to be significantly reduced.

  “Hey, I’m just happy I get to do my part in all this,” Emma said.

  Shaya pointed at me and then back to her. She smiled and then hugged her self, rocking back and forth.

  “Are you asking if we’re together?” Emma asked, still breathing hard.

  Shaya nodded.

  “No, we aren’t together…romantically,” Emma said, glancing at me and then took a concerted interest in the rock map. “The guy, you know, that you interrogated? He said that no one else knew of this attack, so maybe we’re in the clear here.”

  “Subject changer,” Aubrey accused, teasing.

  “No I’m not,” Emma said. “This is important. Not whether Jack and I are having a thing. I mean, I know Jack’s innermost thoughts, and they’ve drawn me in harder than a moth to fire, but we’ve got things to do.”

  Shaya frowned at Emma and then slowly shook her head.

  “Eliza, what’s your gut telling you on this?” I asked.

  “I think you and Emma would make a great couple,” Eliza said. “She’s so tough, and pretty, and has the biggest breasts I’ve ever seen, and she’s nice and —”

  “Eliza,” Emma groaned, hints of red hitting her cheeks.

  “As first wife, I would approve of an exploration into this relationship,” Aubrey said with a smile.

  “First wife?” Sherri asked. “Did you marry the president or something? We didn’t discuss rankings.”

  “Sherri’s right,” Benji said. “Jack loves us all equally, and that’s what makes him the best ever.”

  I still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of them calling themselves my wives, but the girls seemed so happy about it that I couldn’t help but get behind it. I just hoped they weren’t going to go through with the tattoo plans.

  “This world is a gift because it brought us together,” Kara said, staring at me with those ocean eyes.

  She had such heat in those eyes for me, and that tight body with her pale skin and tattoos made me want to take her to the house and explore every inch of her, every lyric and symbol tattooed on her body. I didn’t think I’d ever be in love more than what I was with these ladies, and I planned on expressing to them more about how I felt.

  “So, are we letting Shaya scout this place for us?” Aubrey asked.

  “Yeah, but scout the island. Count the guards, their weapons, and memorize the island well enough that you can draw a map of it. And most importantly, find out what they’re doing with her,” I said.

  Shaya gave a slight nod and then gestured to the ocean.

  “Yeah, you can go now. Do you need anything for the trip?” I asked.

  She shook her head and then walked up and hugged me. I held her and rubbed her back. She took a step back, bowed, and then ran along the white sands about thirty feet into the water before jumping head first and disappearing.

  “Think she’s coming back?” Aubrey asked.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said, staring at the space she entered the water.

  I felt bad that she had to make the journey by herself. She had to be a wreck inside after what she had gone through.

  “She’ll be okay,” Emma said, touching my shoulder.

  We left the beach and headed back to the house to check on our newest arrival. Inside the house, Cass sat next to Carmen, touching her hair and giving me a nod as I walked into the house.

  “How’s she doing?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Cass said. “Is this how I was?”

  “Yeah, for two days we cared for you in this state,” I said.

  “We hauled your ass over, what—three different islands?” Aubrey asked.

  “Four,” Kara said.

  Cass had tears in her eyes as her gaze passed over all of us.

  “Thank you,” she said, choking up. “I’m so sorry for the way I acted.”

  “You’ve told us, sweetie,” Sherri said. “We forgive you. You were just in a bad headspace. We can all get that way sometimes.”

  “You were about as pleasant as a chair made out of thumb tacks,” Emma said. “But we’re good now, Cass. You’re my girl.”

  Cass smiled and wiped a tear from her face. “I can’t believe we all lived in the same house, and yet, I didn’t know you guys. I fucking wasted so much time worrying about the wrong things, wondering if I had any real friends. There you all were, sitting under the same fucking roof, but it took me being stranded on an island—and then days and days out here—before I could even see what was so clearly in front of me. I know now what I was running from, and now I know what I’m running toward.” She looked at each of us.

  “Shit,” Emma said, walking over to Cass. “You’re going to make me cry.”

  A few of the girls were getting teary-eyed. Cass had always been a good person, but sometimes good people get trapped into bad thoughts. A loving but firm hand helped her out of the spiteful fog she’d been lost in. I just hoped the doubt she held never found a way back to her.

  I suspected the stones worked in this manner and would gobble up a personality like Cass’s in a matter of hours. I’d have to make sure Cass never got near one. Then I realized I’d taken one from Carmen and threw it into the ocean. If the stone turned up again, I wouldn’t be surprised. Just another thing I’d have to watch out for.

  Carmen lay on Cass’s lap, looking like a friend that had passed all reasonable levels of intoxication and found, in the final moments of consciousness, a trusted friend’s arms. I’d been to enough parties to know to watch out for the girl that was drinking too much, just to keep an eye on he
r and make sure some bastard guy wouldn’t try to swoop in and take advantage of her inebriation. I’d gotten into one of my few fights with a scumbag doing just that. Made me sick even thinking about it.

  Carmen, on the other hand, was in a safe place now. We would take care of her, just as we did Cass. I just hoped she was okay. I kneeled next to her, Cass looking up at me as I did. Carmen was a beautiful woman. Her hair wasn’t entirely black but rather a dark shade of brown. She had the most perfect eyebrows I’d ever seen, arcing over her closed eyes. She had darker skin, and I thought she was Latina. She wasn’t as toned as the other girls, but nothing close to being heavy. She was more of a soft look, and she wore it well.

  “Carmen,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  She moved, and then her eyes opened, staring straight at me. They were a gorgeous brown with specks of gold in them.

  “Carmen?” Cass asked.

  Then Carmen put her hands over her head and began to scream. She struggled to get to her feet, before stumbling into a wall. She looked wild, as if she might do anything to escape us. The girls didn’t seem afraid of her at all and rushed her, with hugs and sweet comments.

  Carmen put up a fight, but half a dozen strong women were no match for her. She kept blinking, looking at each face and shaking her head.

  Cass walked up next to me, watching the girls wrangle Carmen. After a minute, they seemed to break her, and Carmen started crying, falling into the girls’ arms.

  “You were the first person I saw when I woke, as well,” Cass said.

  “Yeah, and you punched me in the face,” I said, smiling.

  “No I didn’t,” she said.

  “Yeah, you bounced up, punched me, and then went back down,” I said.

  “Did I hurt you?” she asked, and I wasn’t sure if she was being playful or not.

  “Yeah, it hurt. You hit hard,” I said, rubbing my chin.

  “Sorry,” Cass said.

  “It’s all good, and I’m happy to see you being yourself now. You’re a beautiful person,” I said.

  She smiled and nudged me with her elbow. “I want to earn it,” she said.

  “You are, and we’re damn lucky to have our metal bender,” I said.

  “Yeah, that too, but you know?” she asked, nudging me again.

  “What?”

  “Jack, don’t make me spell it out to you. Don’t be that cruel,” Cass said.

  I stared at her blankly, trying to decipher what she was talking about. “You pulling your own weight, working hard, almost too hard, and I heard you kicked ass with Benji—”

  “I’m not pining for compliments, Jack,” she said, looking a little flustered. “I like you. Remember, under the trees, you said I had to earn it?”

  Holy shit, she was talking about hooking up with me. “Yes, I did say that, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, and I’m not talking about now or even tomorrow. I’m talking about down the road. You know, when you might be into someone tall, and athletic, and tan. I can be fun. I’ve been fun many times, and, you know, I can do… oh God, please tell me to shut up, Jack.” She buried her face in her hands.

  “I think you’re fantastic, Cass, but I don’t want to push anything, okay? Let’s just let this naturally play out,” I said and put my hand on her shoulder.

  She patted my hand and nodded. “My last relationship felt more like an arranged union. Nothing ever felt natural about it,” she said. “So, I’d be happy to see where this takes us.”

  “Now let’s see if Carmen’s calm enough to talk now,” I said.

  “You’re going to love her,” Cass said, walking with me toward the group of girls gathered around Carmen.

  They saw me approaching and cleared a space for me to Carmen.

  “Carmen?” I asked.

  She looked up at me with those brown eyes. They were puffy and red from the crying, but there was love in them as well—love for the sisters around her.

  “You’re Jack?” Carmen said. “I remember you from the boat.”

  “Yes, are you hurt?”

  “My head hurts, but I don’t think I’m hurt. They made me drink stuff, nasty stuff. I don’t remember much after that,” Carmen said, putting her hand on her forehead.

  Benji handed her some water, and she drank it down.

  I waited for a second, letting her finish her water before asking my next question.

  “Can you tell us what happened, starting from the moment you woke up here?” I asked.

  “How did you know I woke up here?” she asked.

  “It’s a common thread among us. Just take us back to that moment.”

  Carmen went on to explain how she woke up on a sandy beach, where a large green snake was slithering toward her. That’s when the fish people came out of the water, killed the snake, and took her.

  They placed her in a cage while they spoke to each other in a language she didn’t understand. What was clear, though, was they weren’t happy to have her there. On the second day, a big, muscular fish-man came to their camp and took Carmen from her cage and forced her to drink from a wooden bowl. She tried to refuse, as it smelled rancid, but they held her and forced it down.

  After she drank, everything became a blur, like living in a dream, and forgotten just as quickly. I pressured her about the black rock in her hand, but she didn’t know.

  Benji eyed me as I asked about the black rock, so I explained further that I took it from Carmen and threw it into the ocean. That rock in Carmen’s hand had been the blocker to me projecting my thoughts onto others. I still felt things, but in the presence of the rock I could no longer bridge that gap from observer to influencer. Once the stone had been removed, I was back to full power.

  “That might be her gift?” Benji said.

  “What gifts?” Carmen asked.

  “We should have a talk,” I said, “But first, Benji, you want to make lunch? Something special for our new member?” I asked.

  “Yes, and… oh, I have just the thing,” Benji said.

  “Can I help?” Cass asked.

  “You bet your ass you can,” Benji said.

  “Me too,” Eliza said, looking as if she wanted to get out of the house.

  “So, who wants to unload the boat?” I asked.

  “Oh my God, I almost forgot we’ve got all that pipe to unload,” Sherri said excitedly. “We’re going to have indoor plumbing if it kills me.”

  I laughed. “Sure. Carmen, you up for talking and working. We have a lot to catch you up on.”

  Chapter 33

  I knew of this surprise but only in vague details. The girls had worked on it for some of the evening. I loved the whole idea of it and it brought a little bit of the life we all knew back home, here. Especially for Eliza who had never done anything like this.

  “So, is this like our first date?” Eliza asked, sitting across the table we made from a stump and a large flat stone Benji found.

  The stone, not much larger than a nightstand, wobbled if you pushed on one side. On top of it were two large leaves holding a sea bass fillet sitting on a bed of mango salad.

  “Yeah, I told you, I wanted to give you these kinds of experiences,” I said.

  “I’m open to new experiences,” Eliza said.

  Some of the girls were watching us from the windows and door at the house above. They were as excited about this date as I was. I occasionally heard an awwww from the observers. Night had set in, though, and I wasn’t sure how much they could see with just a small campfire nearby. It gave Eliza and I enough light to see each other in the moonless night. I liked the ambiance of it, and I could tell Eliza was giddy with this attention.

  “What’s your gut been telling you lately?” I asked.

  “It’s been…quiet, actually. I get a feeling about Shaya sometimes, and I have this hint of an urge to go to this woman on that island, but mostly, it’s telling me to be here with you. It feels good here.” She took a drink from the water pouch.

  “Well, I’m sorry I coul
dn’t take you to a five-star restaurant, but I’m enjoying this as well.”

  Eliza looked puzzled, but she had long ago given up asking what this or that meant. I needed to stop mentioning things that she had no way of understanding and made a mental note.

  “You can take me anywhere as long as you take me somewhere,” Eliza said. “This is just perfect. If someone had told me a month ago that I’d be having dinner with a hot guy, have wifey friends, and be fighting off things from the sea, I’d have never believed it, even if my intuition was screaming at me it was real. Sitting here, across from you, I still can’t believe it.”

  “Strange how fate plays out,” I said.

  “You believe in fate?” Eliza asked.

  “Hard not to, when you come to a place like this. What else would bring so many of us together, if not fate?”

  “Could be just random luck,” Eliza said.

  “I would think you’d be the most open one when it came to the ideas of the future. You feel the future,” I said.

  “I think there can be many futures, and it’s our actions that truly make it a reality. Take the last two battles we’ve been in—in both I sensed that one of us could die, and I think it was a real possibility, but we made the right choices and no one did. I don’t think there’s a predetermined outcome. I think we made the outcome.”

  “I get you,” I said. “We are the deciders of our future, to a certain extent, but there is something else at play here and don’t tell me you don’t feel it.”

  She shivered and rubbed her bare arms as she looked around the nearby forest.

  “I feel it, always,” she said.

  “That greater force you feel, I think it wants us together out here to do something,” I said. “That’s what I think of when I say fate.”

  Eliza picked up the last of the fish and ate it. She tried to say something, but almost spit out her food, then tried to cover her mouth as she finished her bite. She smiled, looking embarrassed.

  “Sorry, I’m barely housebroken,” Eliza said.